The Beowulf Project

With the Beowulf project, NASA has provided the Linux community with the opportunity to spread into scientific areas needing big computing power.

Beowulf is one of the most exciting
projects using Linux today. Originating from the Center of
Excellence and Information Sciences (CESDIS) at the NASA-Goddard
Space Center in Maryland, the project's mission statement is:

Beowulf is a project to produce the software for
off-the-shelf clustered workstations based on commodity PC-class
hardware, a high-bandwidth internal network and the Linux operating
system.

The Beowulf project was conceived by Dr. Thomas Sterling,
Chief Scientist, CESDIS. Donald Becker, a Scientist at CESDIS,
wrote the fast-Ethernet drivers needed for the Beowulf-class
clusters and incorporated them into Linux. One of NASA's
imperatives has always been to share technology with universities
and industries. With the Beowulf project, NASA has provided the
Linux community with the opportunity to spread into scientific
areas needing big computing power.

Our cover is a picture of the Beowulf-class cluster, Loki,
used at Los Alamos National Laboratory. For more information about
this cluster and the Hyglac cluster at Caltech, see our feature
article I'm Not Going to Pay a Lot for This
Supercomputer! by Jim Hill, Michael Warren and Patrick
Goda. There are also clusters of this type at Drexel and Clemson
Universities.

In February

Next month, our focus will be on databases, and we have
articles on development, PostgressSQL, SQL in Python and a free
database called Qddb. I think you will find them all enlightening.
We will also feature an article about Digital Domain, a production
studio that does digital special effects for the movies. Digital
Domain used 105 Alphas running Linux and connected by fast Ethernet
to create many of the effects used in the upcoming motion picture
Titanic.

7th USENIX Security Symposium

The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers,
practitioners, system programmers and others interested in the
latest advances in security and applications of cryptography. This
will be a four-day symposium with two days of tutorials, followed
by two days of refereed paper presentations, invited talks,
works-in-progress presentations and panel discussions. It will be
held January 26-29, 1998 at the Marriott Hotel in San Antonio,
Texas. For more information contact the USENIX Conference Office
via e-mail at conference@usenix.org.

Linux Resources on the Web

We've updated our Linux Resources web pages—check them out
at http://www.linuxresources.com/. In addition to the usual
sections pointing to Linux distributions, FAQs, HOWTOs and
Newsgroups, we have:

Linux Speaker's
Bureau: a list of people willing to give Linux talks and
their areas of expertise.

Employment: a
place to go to find a job or the right person for a position
utilizing Linux.

Business
Connection: information on how to promote Linux in the
workplace.

Linux Projects: a
list of current projects being developed in Linux and a message
board for posting ideas for projects.

Linux Library and
News: places to find the latest information about what's
happening in Linux.

We also are providing space for people in the Linux community
to post their information about Linux, so that it can be found in
one area rather than scattered over the web. Write to
webmaster@ssc.com if you wish to make use of this space. Because we
wish this Linux Resources area to be a community effort to promote
Linux, we have kept it non-vendor specific and advertisement
free.

Subscription Fulfillment

Several months ago a light bulb went off and we had what we
thought was a great idea—turn subscriptions over to a fulfillment
house. Our Associate Publisher did a lot of research to find
companies that performed this service and that could accept e-mail
orders. We then picked one that seemed to best fit our needs. In
September, we turned subscriptions over to Superior Fulfillment in
Duluth, Minnesota, expecting to no longer have to worry about this
aspect of the magazine. Well, we were wrong. Murphy's Law took over
and everything that could go wrong did. Superior kept delaying the
date when they would have all of our orders entered into their
system. It was time to get label information to the printer, and we
didn't have it. We began to get angry letters from new subscribers.
Finally, we had to give up on being able to fix the situation long
distance. Superior returned all of the subscription orders to us,
and the majority of LJ's staff spent the next
couple of weeks entering orders and writing letters to our
subscribers. The insert cards in the November and December issues
of LJ all have the Duluth, MN address, but now
it's back to Seattle.

We are most sorry for the inconvenience that this situation
has caused our customers and hope that you will all forgive us. To
us, our subscribers are the most important people in the world, and
we wish to give you the best possible service. Thanks to all of you
who showed us such patience and understanding during the time
period when it seemed like all orders were lost.

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Webinar: 8 Signs You’re Beyond Cron

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